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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Sigh... the notion that bikes are just toys or exercise equipment is such a harmful misconception, it's ridiculous. Rather than writing a huge wall of text trying to explain the vast depths of how important cycling is I'll just cite this blog post this blog post that explains it better than I can.
Of course, that article was written from an individual perspective, so even it manages to understate how important cycling is. Americans' dismissal of cycling in favor of driving, and the car-dependent [sub]urban design that results from that choice, is the underlying cause for the housing crisis and all the other crises that stem from that!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=4ZxzBcxB7Zc
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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That's by far the biggest issue (which I say not to diminish the others, but just to emphasize how bad this one is). The sheer space that cars take up in terms of roads and parking lots makes it practically impossible to design a city capable of accommodating them without ruining it for walking/biking/transit by having to spread destinations too far apart. We literally bulldozed thriving downtowns to make room for them (compare: Houston 1938 vs. Houston 1978)!
On top of that, cars are responsible for facilitating the literal Ponzi scheme that is suburbia. In short: subdivisions full of single-family houses with a lot of street frontage per housing unit generate less tax value per unit area than the infrastructure connecting them costs to maintain, making them inherently unsustainable financially (let alone ecologically, etc.).
Because Americans urban planners in the '50s had a hard-on for cars instead of taking bikes seriously as transportation, almost all of North America and increasing parts of the rest of the world are now fundamentally built wrong in a way that destroys health, the economy, and the environment all at once, and it'll cost trillions of dollars to fix it.
I say this without exaggeration or hyperbole: ditching bikes in favor of cars may vary well have been the biggest disaster in the history of the world.